Other Minds
I’ve been thinking about empathy, and about the role it plays in game design. There’s a fair amount of discussion of ‘empathy games’ – games created by and from the perspective of marginalized creators, games created to push you into…
Category Narrative Design
Multimedia
What’s interesting about games as a medium is that, as I touched on briefly last week, they aren’t a medium in any substantial sense. Yes, there are certain expectations and technical restraints and conventions, but nothing that can’t be easily…
A Miner Shift
Decades ago, a friend told me a logic problem that had a big impact on how I see the world. Two workers emerge from the coal mines after a long day of work: One’s face is covered in soot, the…
Roads
We are surrounded in spirals by the paths we never took. Every choice ever made was a branching point, and just under the surface of our lives lie the possibilities of countless other lives we might have lived. This is…
Leaders
The conceit of strategy games is an interesting one. Most strategy games place you as the general of an army, or some other authority figure, and tasks you with managing an army or other complex system and directing it towards…
Eight Seconds: Manipulated Through Time
For the past month, I’ve been working on my entry to the Idle Thumbs community game jam, Wizard Jam X. This is the final Wizard Jam, due to the Idle Thumbs podcast going into a long-term hiatus from which it…
Subsystems
Last week I wrote about how no two people walk away from a piece of art with the same conception of what they just saw. I mostly couched that in terms of older media like visual art and film, but…
Static
If we are alone, and we are dissatisfied, we can change the scene – either by traveling or adapting the world to suit ourselves. If we are with a few other people, it is usually still possible to convince them…
Virtually Real
Virtual reality will never be what you want it to be. What do we want virtual reality to be? We want the complete experience of being someone or something else. We want to be able to do what they can…
Mundane
To play a game is to perform a series of tasks it asks of you. Most of the time, these tasks are some sort of challenge of dexterity, cognition, perception, or some combination thereof. There are also, though, a number…